Cursor Acquires Graphite to Unify AI Code Development Platform

Cursor, the AI coding assistant created by Anysphere, announced on December 19, 2025, that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Graphite, a code review platform, in a transaction valued at over $290 million. The deal brings together complementary capabilities in code generation and review, positioning the combined entity as an end-to-end platform for AI-assisted software development. Graphite will continue operating as an independent product under Cursor's umbrella while gaining access to significantly greater resources. The acquisition reflects a fundamental shift in modern development workflows that both companies identified: developers are no longer constrained by how quickly they can write code, but rather by how quickly code can be reviewed and validated. Graphite serves leading engineering organizations including Shopify, Snowflake, Robinhood, Figma, and Ramp, companies that have adopted the platform to manage the increased velocity of code generation enabled by AI tools. The entire Graphite team will join Cursor following the transaction's close, expected within the coming weeks.

Strategic Integration Plans

Graphite's roadmap includes strengthening its stacked pull requests platform and merge queue functionality while building seamless integrations between Cursor's local development environment and Graphite's pull request management system. The companies plan to combine Graphite's AI Reviewer with Cursor's Bugbot to create what they describe as the most powerful AI reviewer on the market. Both organizations share common investors, including Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, which facilitated alignment on the strategic vision. According to Graphite co-founder and CEO Merrill Lutsky, the combined platform aims to create an integrated environment where developers and AI agents collaboratively create, review, and merge code changes. "We've long dreamed of connecting the surfaces where we create, collaborate on, and validate code changes," Lutsky stated, "and this deal dramatically accelerates the timeline on which we can make that a reality."

Market Context

The acquisition follows Cursor's pattern of active deal-making, having previously acquired Growth by Design and Koala as part of its strategy to expand capabilities across the developer toolchain. The deal signals broader consolidation in the AI-powered developer tools space, as traditional boundaries between code generation and code review collapse. Companies are increasingly demanding integrated solutions rather than point tools, creating incentives for platforms to offer end-to-end capabilities in the age of AI-assisted development.

Decoded

Cursor's acquisition of Graphite reveals a critical strategic battle emerging in developer tools: owning the complete AI development workflow. While AI coding assistants like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and others have captured headlines for accelerating code creation, the industry is discovering that faster code generation simply moves the bottleneck downstream to review and validation.

By acquiring Graphite, Cursor is betting that the company controlling both code generation and review will dominate the next era of software development. This consolidation also reflects a maturation of the AI developer tools market, where shared investor backing (Accel and A16z in this case) is facilitating strategic combinations rather than prolonged competition. The deal's $290+ million valuation demonstrates that investors view code review infrastructure as equally valuable to code generation in an AI-first world, a significant shift from just two years ago when coding assistants commanded premium attention and valuations.

Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, announced on December 19, 2025, that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Graphite, an AI-powered code review platform. Sources indicate the deal was priced "way over" Graphite's last valuation of approximately $290 million and involves a mixture of cash and equity. The acquisition addresses what Cursor CEO Michael Truell describes as a critical shift in the development workflow: while AI has dramatically accelerated code writing, the review process has become the primary bottleneck for engineering teams.

Graphite, founded nearly five years ago by Merrill Lutsky, Tomas Reimers, and Greg Foster, raised $52 million in a Series B round just nine months ago. The platform serves tens of thousands of engineers at over 500 companies, including Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, Ramp, and Perplexity. Graphite's specialized toolset features "stacked pull requests," which enable developers to work on multiple dependent changes simultaneously without waiting for approvals, fundamentally rethinking the traditional code review workflow that creates development delays.

The deal represents Cursor's third acquisition in the past year, following its purchase of AI coding assistant Supermaven in November 2024 and the talent acquisition from CRM startup Koala in July. Cursor, valued at $29 billion in November 2025, has been aggressively building out its platform as competition intensifies from OpenAI, Anthropic, and GitHub Copilot. The company announced reaching $1 billion in annualized revenue just last month, demonstrating the explosive growth in the AI developer tools market.

Graphite will continue operating as an independent product with its existing team and brand intact. Throughout 2026, the companies plan to integrate their platforms with tighter connections between Cursor's local development environment and Graphite's pull request management. The combined offering will merge Graphite's AI Reviewer with Cursor's Bugbot to create what they describe as the most powerful AI code review capability on the market. Both companies share common investors, including Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, which likely facilitated the alignment and transaction.

The transaction is expected to close within the next few weeks, subject to customary closing conditions. Upon completion, the entire Graphite team will join Cursor to continue development. Lutsky emphasized that the acquisition accelerates Graphite's vision of creating "one integrated platform where humans and agents create, review, and merge code changes collaboratively," describing a future where pull requests become self-driving and the traditional boundaries between code creation and review collapse entirely.